Making astronaut ice cream in my home shop
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ย. 2024
- In his recent post, Chris Gammell used astronaut ice cream as a fun example of how high tech innovation trickles down to consumer-level products. Seeing an image of astronaut ice cream in my G+ feed got me thinking about making some of my own. I managed to accomplish this with a harbor freight vacuum pump, some dry ice and various hoses and fittings. The process is known as freeze-drying and allows water to pass directly from ice to vapor, thus allowing the ice cream to maintain its physical structure while it is dried.
What should I freeze-dry next?
engineerblogs.o...
Apparently, "astronaut ice cream" has rarely or maybe never been eaten by astronauts in space. I believe NASA investigated the idea, but never really used it. Someone discovered the novelty value of the snack, and the name "astronaut ice cream" added even more appeal to the product, even though its not entirely accurate.
I imagine it being similar to powder creamer, but crunchy. I used to love eating dry baby formula when I was a toddler. My cursed mother limited me, but otherwise I might have eaten the whole can. "It's yummy you guys" -E.Cartmen.
This is correct. Astronauts actually had normal ice cream as a treat, and not the freeze-dried kind.
Regardless of this fact, they typically sell astronaut ice cream at NASA visitor centers (the Wallops Island one had it the past few times I was there)
@@garrett2449 "NASA" visitor centers are not operated by NASA but by independent companies to provide entertainment
Pretty much all food taken into space is freeze dried. When every Lb of weight is costing $50,000 who want to remove as much weight as possible from your food.
YOUR FACE WHEN YOU ATE THE ICE CREAM. priceless :) great videos mate!
He looks like a good soul.
I was thinking the same thing!
Its been more than 5 years, we deserve the spill clip with audio.
I agree that STEM education could be vastly improved at every level. Hands-on demos, real-world applications, labs/experiments that aren't pointless would all be good. Look to hackerspaces and internships to compete with universities and maybe even lower grade levels.
Freeze dry watermelon (93% water)! I suspect it will turn into a pink and sweet polystyrene.
mossdee that's a cool idea, OP PIN THIS MAN!
mossdee Actually, I believe it's 97% water.
I guess you would then need a much bigger cold trap.
No bigger than the amount of watermelon, luckily.
That fucking smile at the beginning.
That's pure nostalgia.
They add oils to the chocolate in ice cream to stop it being too hard when it is frozen, this probably accounts for the problems you are having with the chocolate.
You need a vacuum pump, which I detailed in the video. I doubt that a compressor would work well enough, since they are designed to create pressures above ambient, not below.
I think a simple explanation of the sucrose' effect on freezing is actually an essential part of achieving good ice cream texture. What happens is as the water goes to a solid phase, the remaining liquid becomes more and more saturated, giving it a lower and lower freezing point. You can freeze off a lot of water at high temperatures, but to get it all you have to deal with very, very saturated water-sucrose solutions.
I make ice cream for a hobby, and it's actually really difficult to deal with a consumer freezer, as it doesn't get lower than -25C, much like your water cooler. To combat slowly solidifying ice structures, I have to use a lot of extra proteins to mask the large ice crystals in my ice cream. If I had a colder freezer, I could leave much of that protein out of the mix because quickly freezing ice results in smaller crystals.
Your explanation of how increasingly concentrated sugar solutions lowers the freezing point made me think about the prickly pear cactus surviving freezing winters with this mechanism when other cacti cannot. "After 7 weeks [at cooler temperatures], relative water content decreased ... mucopolysaccharide content increased ... hygroscopic mucopolysaccharide acts as a passive water capacitor to reduce water efflux during extracellular freezing ...The ability of O. humifusa to tolerate extracellular freezing and cellular dehydration, together with the increases in mucopolysaccharide at low temperatures, may help explain its distribution in regions of North America that are subject to subzero temperatures for prolonged periods in the winter." Loik, M. E., & Nobel, P. S. (1991). Water relations and mucopolysaccharide increases for a winter hardy cactus during acclimation to subzero temperatures. Oecologia, 88(3), 340-346. doi:10.1007/bf00317576
6:20 Grabs thermos overflowing with sub-zero ethanol. Yikes!
+Isaac Levy
No audio track.
I wonder if he was panic-swearing or panic-squealing.
+Isaac Levy Yeah that's basically nightmare fuel. Every time I see his videos I half expect something to go very very very wrong.
I believe it overflowed because it wasn't that cold and that's why it evaporated the dry ice so quickly.
You should probably keep the pressure below 500 mtorr. The size of the pump needed will depend on the amount of material you want to freeze-dry and how quickly you want to do it. This pump is well-sized for a single serving of ice cream to be dried in under 18 hours.
I'm gathering parts to make a freeze dryer, and I'm wondering how important the water trap is. Why not just let the water vapor go through the pump? The low pressure line could be heated to make sure the water did not freeze inside the pump when it reached 1 atm pressure.
@@machinemaker2248 Depending how much water needs to be removed, you might be able to use only the pump. It will accumulate water, so change the oil frequently. Use a large diameter hose between the chamber and pump (or trap) to give good conductance for the water vapor.
@@AppliedScience How good of you to reply to me on a 9 year old video. I very much appreciate it. Thank you for the guidance, too.
I absolutely LOVE Ben's childlike enthusiasm for his work and the foodstuffs he makes!!❤️
We can see the kid in you when you smiled!
It is awesome to see someone so genuinely and innocently happy!!!😊
If MacGyver saw all the stuff you do with just a vacuum pump he'd shit his pants.
I guess he took this comment as a suggestion and freeze dried his own poop.
I think it's very sweet that something so simple could bring so much joy. That is to say, when you take the bite to start you seem very happy, and that's a good thing to see.
Well done with the experiments and projects, I've enjoyed watching them.
Thanks Chris, you filled in all of the missing pieces I had for building my own freeze dryer, especially with the Harbor Freight pump. Great job!!!!!
I think you're the best educator on youtube! Your videos just keep getting better and better and are always interesting to watch.
This makes me nostalgic! I remember freeze dried ice cream from those awesome space museums...
Awesome work!
The look on your face after you took that first bite was priceless. I saw pure joy. and THAT is a sign that something works!
It wasn't really a negative comment, just a curiosity; it's nice to watch something that brings back memories of simpler times in life. It's pretty amazing how much technique is involved in such seemingly simple foods. The look on his face at the beginning when he first tries it is priceless.
I did work on industrial freeze dryers in the 90's. The head engineer made museum displays out of road kill. You could try to freeze dry a mouse.
"good thing there was no audio track on this one" hahahahaha
This is awesome! For backpacking and portaging trips I usually dehydrate food/meals to carry. However, not all food dehydrates well and many more don't rehydrate well. I have found that chicken is the one thing that I always end up buying freeze-dried, but it's expensive. If you're going to experiment more with freeze-drying, I'd love to see chicken, vegetables such as leafy greens and different fruits undergoing this process and also how they taste once re-hydrated.
Great fun! I'll be sure to follow your videos from now on.
Also, in case anyone else is interested, today's (16-Janurary) Harbor Freight circular has this exact vacuum pump on sale for $110. (It's usually $175.) Sale is good through the 22nd.
We have something just like this in Federal Way, Washington State, U.S.
It's a ice cream shop called Sub Zero, they freeze the ice cream and it is simply amazing! People from all over go there just to record how they make it.
***** Yup, just like what your described.
I second WeBDaEMoN33 - I could see the child returning in your facial reaction. That was awesome, because it was real.
Great vid, educational.
"Good thing there was no audio track on this one..." LOL!
Wow! That's is great video I just stumbled on to it on my home page. Great tutorial and explanation of the science behind what you did. I am a mechanical engineering student and you just covered everything in one video. Thermo, material science, and chemistry all in 12 minutes, great job.
I would try to do a Popsicle since its a not milk based it will have a higher water content and sucrose aswell. It may add for a challenge because of the sucrose, but I think it would be interesting.
Earned a subscriber!
Any decent ice cream or popsicle should have at least a good part of dextrose along with the sucrose
I was thinking while watching your build out that your water trap needed to be larger. My first thought was 'Hey, that pipe is going to clog with ice in no time'. lol I was going to suggest a canister styled water trap so you could capture a larger volume of water without restricting the pressure.
However, excellent work! Bravo. And my vote would be to attempt Bananas as well. A really odd suggestion would be Potatoes, because I have no idea what would happen.
The water will get into the vacuum pump and may cause it to fail since there is enough liquid to fill up the whole pump chamber. It may also destroy the pump slowly by causing excessive rust.
Love the look of nostalgia on his face, when he took a bite of the ice cream.
Man, you put to shame any of those other guys on TV that need to kick, scream, or blow up things to get show off real DIY stuff. Solid work that gets the point across.
How about using a hacked microwave oven to beam in the heat? It might speed up the process?
freeze-dry requests: pudding, watermelon, bacon (both cooked and raw), Kevin Bacon, peanut butter, sun-dried fruit, chewy fruit snacks, alcoholic beverage, pizza, butter, margarine, a boiled egg, slime (the glue, water, and borax kind), silly putty, a glue stick, a bar of soap.
I have two thoughts - make your favourite soup and see if you can get a freeze-dried product similar to packets of dry soup that can be reconstituted. Another would be jerky of some sort to see if "freeze dried" meat is palatable, or completely "non-jerky-like".
The problem is that the water vapor will condense in the vacuum pump, eventually fill it with water, and cause it to seize and/or be destroyed from rust.
I'm wondering if heating the pump would avoid that. It would certainly be a lot easier to heat the pump than using the vapor trap.
When water turns to vapor it expands by keeping a section super cold and freezing the water you help the vacuum pump not have to work as hard.
There is a breed of frog (North American wood frog, for one) that uses that sucrose trick to allow themselves to be frozen solid during the winter without cellular damage. As the temperature drops, as I understand it, water molecules migrate from the cells and are replaced by sucrose (or glucose, maybe). This prevents water crystals from forming and bursting the cells.
Oddly, The Jo-Ann Fabrics store (of all places) near me always has astronaut ice cream in stock.
If you opened an internet shop I'd be your first customer for some astronaut ice cream!
How about freeze drying some watermelon? I heard of that before and always thought it sounded interesting because watermelon has SO much water in it, it would change dramatically when freeze dried.
10 years ago... WOW! I remember it as yesterday
I think there is a lot of sugar and lactose that provide some crystalline structure.
Thanks, awesome video. Haven't seen phase diagrams in quite some time. Been some years since I was a refrigeration engineer :)
@Jason BL O'Connell Compared to glass, metal is a much better heat conductor. So, when heat is applied to the metal container, the heat is transferred pretty quickly to the ice cream.
@rkward101 I believe he was referring to the "chocolaty coating" covering the ice cream bar he used for the experiment, not the ice cream itself. As you can see at the start of the video, the chocolate ice cream has freeze-dried successfully.
Could you in theory use some sort of small pressure-rated tank in place of your cold trap? Would that solve your problem of ice buildup?
This is the kind of stuff that would make students pay attention in school. Loved the pop rocks vid too
I know this is an old video, but you really shoulda done a follow-up with dippin' dots. I'm not sure exactly how they're made, but I know liquid nitrogen is involved so it seems like it's right up your alley.
The toughest component to find here in California are the tungsten incandescent light bulbs!
I have learned SO much from you Ben. I'll watch your channel for the rest of my life if you keep making videos
Peaches, mangoes, and strawberries. You might need to also play with various semi-preservatives, however, to prevent them rusting during the freeze-drying process (which might make for another interesting science lesson).
Though a whole freeze-dried watermelon, per another poster, is an intriguing thought. Just to see what it would look like. :)
I learned so much from this video. Thanks for making this!
Spider. I collect spiders, but my spiders cannot be pinned because they shrink due to their thin cuticles. I want to make your-designed freeze dryer, but I want to make sure your design CAN freeze dry a spider. What you do is find a spider, catch it, freeze it to kill it, take it out and let it briefly thaw, pin it onto foam (position the legs out), with 10mm between the dorsum of spider's body and pin head, freeze again, then put in the dryer. This would be so great. Thanks so much!
I love you for trying this, I've wanted to for so long but refused to destroy my UHV system. I may try this with one of Harbor Freight's throwaway-pumps and a isopropyl/dry ice cold trap. The only change I'd make to your setup would be the use of some cheap 2.75" conflats, less implosion risk more conductive.
Its like eating crunchy marshmallows. I love it, it melts in your mouth.
Freeze dry curry. Then crush it into a powder and use it as a condiment because salt and pepper is too boring, and curry powder is too raw
de0509 curry is actually an English invention based on popular Indian herbs and spices. Kind of a mish mash of various popular regional dishes, Order curry in India and they say "what?"
@@craigcooper8593 There's thousands of different types of curries here haha.
Thank you for this. We bought astronaut ice cream for quarantine home school, and watched this video for our "science class!" Very cool!
It's great how your face lit up after tasting the ice cream! :)
Your videos are incredibly informing and entertaining! Keep them coming!
I really enjoy your informative videos. Like being back in college physics/chemistry classes.
Thanks
Actually in a freeze dryer most oils and fats to my knowledge also boil away, I have boiled oils and stuff like that in my freeze dryer. Pretty much anything that is a fluid goes bye bye, leaving behind a brittle crunchy food item. Also keep in mind for most food items, the softness of them is generally related to moisture content, so once that moisture content is brought down the 3 - 3.5% the food is left in a brittle crunchy state. Even freeze dried steak is somewhat brittle.
The freeze drying in excange for supercritical gases could be used to create aeregel. Simply by excanging the Methanol for water and freezing it. This frozen aerogel then can be dried in vacuo. Another method would be the hydrolysation of sodium silicate in aqueus solution, which would yield a silicagel similar to yours but with wather in between rhe structure. in this case you wouldn't need the solvent excange process. Plese try it. I'm courius how these aerogels would come out.
I like your visual at 9:50 it helped me how lowering the pressure can make it instantly to a vapor!
Bring some to Valve! BTW. Great job!
I was mostly interested in the final product and seeing a close up of you breaking it apart. But I'm upset you never showed that.
The chocolate used for ice cream isn't like the kind you will find in other foods, its the lowest melting point crystal form of chocolate. Its used in ice cream because even though it is surrounded by cold ice cream on you tongue it will melt. This may be a reason that the chocolate was so flimsy as it melts from 61-67° F
3:00 - Thanks man, just the stuff I was looking for. I almost used the wrong hose.
Yeah, very likely it will be fine. You may want to wrap the jar in "hardware cloth" or heavy chicken wire to contain the wreckage if it decides to implode.
Some modern cooking techniques use liquid nitrogen in order to deep freeze liquids, such as fruit juice in a balloon. The balloon is then removed and they are left with a fruit juice shell. Perhaps you could attempt something like that. Like, a cooked, pureed, and strained fruit or vegetable juice that has the water removed and see what is left? Perhaps a high-tech fruit roll up sheet, or a sticky gummy blob that could possibly be spread?
Maybe they call it astronaut ice cream because you can use the vacuum of space instead of a pump.
just that whole phase diagram part was so cool, i learned something today!
Cool thanks. The compressor vs thermoelectric cooler information is extremely helpful. One last thing though. We have an old compressor cooled water cooler that we still use what are the chances messing something up on it. Will it over work the compressor at all? I just want to be able to say with s fair amount of certainty that I'm not gonna break it. Keep up the good work and keep great videos coming. You are an inspiration to tinkerers / garage scientist everywhere!
Was it the Ames museum in Tennessee I went there many times as a child and I too loved the astronaut ice cream. Lol. ive taken my children a few times as well. Last year we went. I think it was only like three dollars to get in. They got to go up on stage and at with electricity and we watched their hair stand on end. It is a great place 😀. God bless
yea thats your basic solder you can buy at any local hardware store, I've actually seen it in a few dollar discount type places over the years
This is my fav channel on utube now...
Another shout out to safeway is the 24hr parking lot handy. Gotta love safeway.
This guy splits atoms and creates mini warp engines on his workbench when he's bored
Geeze
I smiled at the beginning of the video when you said it was like how you remembered it
It was a pretty nice video, something I always wanted to try. Our local farmers market sells freeze-dried green beans. I often wondered were they freeze-dried really? Every once in a while I would get one that seems kind of all oily leading me to wonder if they had been fried. Great video thanks
That priceless memory rush at 0:17 :)
I wonder if a water cooler could be made into an effective cold trap by adding additional cooling such as fans and heat sinks to the heat dissipating coil (or whatever it's called) before the compressor? The coolers and mini-fridges I've seen have little or nothing to actually cool the freon before being compressed.
Dear Chris, you have been using all kind of protective methods to reduce the risk of having water entering to the vacuum pump. Question, why not using instead a Plastic membrane vacuum pump?
This pump reduces the pressure and is never affected by water, isn't it a replacing solution to all the cooling suction trouble?
Hi Mr. Krasnow, I'm trying to do this as a project, but I can't seem to get the pressure of the system below .2 bar. I am using smaller diameter hosing, could this be the issue? Will using larger hosing actually decrease overall pressure that significantly? It doesn't seem to make very much sense why that would change it that much. I am using the a pump of similar power to yours. In addition, isn't using an Erlenmeyer flask an implosion risk with pressures that low? Thanks for answering in advance!
Using large-diameter tubing is important for good vapor flow at low pressures, but if you can't get below .2bar, you have a large leak, or a broken pump. Everything has some level of risk. The risk of the flask imploding is low enough to be tolerable in my opinion.
Applied Science
gotcha, thanks so much!
Jeotl
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+Applied Science The vacuum probably doesn't have to be that strong, since it's just the partial pressure of water that has to be below the triple point, not the total pressure.
+Applied Science While you're probably right about the low risk of an imploding flask, it's still a good idea to use the correct tools for the job. There is a lot of glassware which is made specifically for use with vacuum systems. The flask linked below looks like it is intended to hold up against a vacuum (sorry, I didn't see a more appropriately sized flask):
www.amazon.com/United-Scientific-FG5340-1000-Borosilicate-Tubulation/dp/B00ES3R29M/ref=pd_sbs_328_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=31Vko3olz0L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR174%2C320_&refRID=1YG631GJP6E0E11KXP93
I majored in chemistry and I would get in trouble if I used a normal flask in a vacuum system.
Thanks for another great video.
Ice (s)cream for Ice cream.. Your description is crYstal clear. Thank you!
This guy REALLLLLLLY wanted some goddamn ice cream!!!!
I also seem to remember there being an "astronaut pizza" and it kind of tasted like pizza combos. can you show how that is done if possible?
You don't know his life. Just because he is smart and knows things that the average person may not, that doesn't make him a "low life" in any way. You should be happy because he is sharing his knowledge with you.
I expected this to be a lot easier. I might keep just buying them instead of spending time and money into making this crazy contraption :P
.... Same!!
Never had it because I've never seen it sold anywhere. Ebay has it from $11 for one down to $5.50 each sandwich if you get 4. To rich for my blood for 1 sandwich. Maybe if I ever
if you are still taking sugestions, freeze dry a frozen graphene solution in the shape of a plate.
@ccorday microwave a marshmallow until it puffs up and then let it cool completely.
The texture will be just like the ones in cereal!
Huray!!! Someone who knows the difference between viscous and molecular flow in vacuum systems!!!
Pretty cool. I don't understand why the cold trap is necessary, though. Wouldn't the vacuum alone be enough to dry the ice cream? That type of vacuum pump is designed to exhaust extracted water vapor directly into the atmosphere.
Wait a second, why would you need a water trap anyway -- cant the vac pump handle gas-form water vapor?
On the pressurized side of the pump the water will condense as liquid I suspect.
the water becomes dispersed in the pump oil and vaporises in the pump breaking the vaccum level
I had never heard of astronaut icecream, but now I want to eat astronaut icecream
This is awesome I remember going to the museum and getting some dried ice cream too!
Then one might wonder: Why exactly did Ben make astronaut ice cream? Because he can! And that's awesome.
Subbed.
You're so cool, dude. These are essentially wizard powers.
i imagine ben rolling up to safeway at 4 am to get dry ice for some manic experiment
0:19 the face of true happiness
Peeps- please, please. I love them when they get stale, drying out. Freeze-dried Peeps would be amazing!
> what should I freeze-dry next?
Make large slabs of "sea-gel" aerogel? I heard about this but never tried it. Does it actually work? Mix up some somewhat-hard agar, alginate. Supposedly it won't collapse upon drying like all the more fragile gel structures.
Then store it under helium, so it falls upwards when brought into normal air. (Or can it only float in a CO2 aquarium?
I'm only 16...and I understood everything...this was an amazing video...
strawberries-
Such a chill guy